The first “You Can Be Good Without God” placard was placed on the side of a city bus by Jesus Christ sometime during the first quarter of the first century CE. Well … OK … technically speaking, that is not true: there were neither placards nor city buses to put them on in the first century CE. But everything else about the first sentence is true. What Jesus actually did, according to the Gospel of Matthew, was to teach “You Can Be Good Without God” in the famous Parable of the Sheep and the Goats … which around a hundred generations of preachers and homilists then proceeded to misinterpret by getting the story exactly, precisely 180 degrees “bass-ackwards”. It is this mis-reading of the Sheep / Goats parable that renders the bus-placard sign, and the sentiment behind it, so scandalous. Li...

Hard as it is to believe – hard as it is for even me to believe – there was once a time when I was a conservative. I was quite conservative all the way through my undergraduate years, during the time when I was writing a weekly column “Looking Forward” for the Wichita Eagle and Beacon newspaper in Wichita, KS, all through graduate school, and for a brief time even after my wife Diane and I moved to Seattle from Boston. I even voted for Ronald Reagan … twice. No more. In fact, for most of the Seattle years – we moved here in 1989 – I have been moving to the left with vertiginous speed. You can now locate me, ideologically, somewhere to the left of Elizabeth Warren, most likely in Bernie Sanders / Kshama Sawant territory.
Obvious question … Why?
The short answer is Fear … or, rather, not...